Easy meal for 2: Minced Beef and Veggies over Cousous

After such heavy meals and large portions my husband and I are working to curb our increased appetite, and one of the ways to do that is to cook just enough for two portions without leftovers. We try to be self-disciplined to only eat the portion size that we should but we are often guilty of cleaning up the dish. So I am often experimenting with easy meals that only cook up enough for the two of us. This dish came from me trying to use up an odd assortment of veggies that I had leftover from two other recipes. What are tricks that you have come up with to try to make sure that you don't over eat?

Having a baby changes everything

My cheeky monkey

Four months ago my life changed in ways that even now I can't quite grasp, I gave birth to the most precious, baby girl. She is the absolute apple of her mommy's eye and occupies my every waking, and sleeping moments. And I have to say that it isn't always easy to keep up with things like laundry, dishes, cooking and especially blog postings. Some how they all seem to fall along the wayside. I am not sure what I expected to happen with my time after having a baby, but I have to confess that I didn't expect it to effect me this much. A baby takes so much time and attention away from the little things that you need to do during the day, that often times the whole day can go by without something productive happening. It is quite a change to have to get use to.

The other day I found myself looking through another persons food blog and I found myself feeling slightly intimidated by how amazing everything was. The writing was flawless, the photos put mine to absolute shame and their following was strong as it deserved to be so. I found myself thinking I could never complete with that and felt myself wanting to give up. Now sure maybe those thoughts were fueled by the higher amounts of hormones that seem to be pumping through my body these days but none the less it was something I had to work through. So I did have a long think about things, trying to figure out if I was giving my all to my work and if there was anything else I could do to improve. But you know what then the baby cried and I had to take care of her and then I realized something, sometimes as mums for some reason we think that we need to be perfect in all that we do. We need to have the perfect children, a clean house and just be all around amazing, super mums. But the truth of the matter is all we can do is give it our best and don't expect any more then that. My blog might not be the best blog out there with the most stunning photography, but it is real and comes from my heart and that is all I can ask of myself.

So I want to challenge you, no matter where you are in your life, don't expect more from yourself then you can give. All you can do is give it your best and let the rest fall away. Right now the most important job I have is taking care of my daughter everything else is gravy.

Easy Apple and Tayberry crumble

The last part of my pregnancy was really hard, I just really wanted my baby to get here but she was stubborn and was late. One of the things that we decided to do to distract me from my overly pregnant state was go out to the pick-your-own farm and get some fresh berries. Twelve hours later interestingly enough after this very pregnant lady spent a few hours bending down picking strawberries and walking along bushes gathering other berries I went into labor. Maybe she smelled the delicious berries we were gathering and just had to come out to try some I am not really sure but I am glad she did decide to finally make her appearance. So now we have tons of large bags of a wide variety of berries in the freezer it is fun to come up with ways to use them. Strangely enough when I was pregnant I really didn't want sweet things, but ever since this little one popped out my sweet tooth has been alive and kicking so this has made our berry reserve even more tantalizing.  One of the berries that we picked was one that I had never tried before, a tayberry, which looks a lot like a very large blackberry but has more similar characteristics to a raspberry. So I decided to play around with these berries for the first time and create an apple and tayberry crumble. Again focusing on ease because of the baby, a crumble is a fantastic way to enjoy the deliciousness of a desert without having to go through a lot of effort.